Au paradis

And so, it came to this one night as I slept alone in my igloo. I had an occasion to dream about paradise. Paradise, you see, is not at all like the biblical perception of paradise. It is not quite like the Garden of Eden. When one lives in the Arctic tundra, one is unlikely ever to see as much as a bush, but only low shrubs and tiny, intricate flowers in all the colors of the rainbow. This was a different sort of a paradise.

In my dream, I became the incredible shrinking man! I had inadvertently drunk water from a small lake which contained the ingredients that nature had mixed together over a millennium. Anyone who drank it shrank over the course of a year to a size too small for the human eye to see.

By the end of that year, I was living among the shrubs at the foot of a majestic mountain. It was as if I had been dropped in the middle of the Amazonian jungle! If one was looking for the largest trees in the world, one only had to come to the Arctic to see them. And if one was on the lookout for the largest blueberry bush, he was in the midst of my paradise.

I had become the only man in this particular paradise since no other human was ever to be seen again, although on occasion, I would hear thundering noises from afar. I always thought them to be my distant cousins who were walking about, perhaps looking for me. And even if they were able to find me, I could never relate to them again. A normal-sized human being could not communicate with insects underfoot.

This accidental drugging gave me extraordinary solitude I had been seeking for a lifetime. No other human would ever bother with me again, giving me rare solace from the chaos that humanity had brought to our world. I could live comfortably by becoming a vegetarian. At first this was a difficult transition after having grown up as a devout eater of raw flesh. Somehow, I felt at peace with myself since I would not have any trouble, ever again, relating to k.d. lang. I knew I could still inadvertently rile the Alberta cattlemen, but that was the least of my worries.

I was a world unto myself and lived happily ever after. This must be how the Christian god lives in His paradise, not in the far off Heaven, but between the shrubs underfoot in the middle of the Great White Arctic. I was convinced of this as I lived in my own paradise among the shrubs.